2300 Thoughts

Social Media?

How serious should public relations professionals really get about social media? Consider the number of users on Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, You Tube, and your head starts to hurt just a little bit. The opportunities for public relations through these new forms of media are absolutely endless. I would dare say that most of them have yet to be found and utilized to their fullest potential.

Social media can help you track the number of people talking about your clients, and even what they are saying about specific products or services they are providing. Giving you instant feedback on what the public really thinks about your company. With those amazing opportunities and information packs social media also provides multiple challenges for public relations professionals.

Before social media a broken guitar would not have even registered on the scale of public relations problem, but thanks to social media it is now labeled as a crisis! Social media gives customers a place to talk about different products, relate to each other’s experiences with the product, so if that experience is not good, the experience will travel at least twice as fast, and now result in a crisis.

I am learning something new about social media every day. I think the impact that social media is having on the world is greatly underestimated by public relations, and marketing professionals. In my opinion a smart public relations firm would be getting on board with social media and hiring some young fresh public relations graduates who understand social media to launch their clients “social identity.” Sometimes who you appear to be online is more powerful than who you actually are.